Turning the breadcrumb into a navigation menu idea. Rubbish?

Stuart Wright

Well-known member
Not sure if this is a small or big feature.

So we have had an extended menu on AVForums for years where people can drill down a fair way into the sub forums to quickly get to the area of interest.

menu1.webp
and I was thinking about how we could implement this into Xenforo when we move in August.
Going forward the new header will have more of an emphasis on editorial and the forums will be just one of several main menu options, making the job even harder.

mockup.webp

Then I had a thought that maybe we could use the breadcrumb as a way to navigate through the nodes.
Hover over one of the breadcrumbs in the trail and the whole list of siblings drops down. From there it's possible to highlight one and its children pop out to the right in another list. And so on.

I created a mockup. Obviously it would need to be styled to look much prettier.
1.webp

It would allow for relatively fast navigation to every node in the forum from every page, and would, of course, need to use the jQuery system detailed here.
Anyone think this is a good idea? Or is it rubbish?
 
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Upvote 35
@James - need to Like it then. ;)

I too think this is good.
Just as a touch of spice I already added a LATEST! button on the end of breadcrumbs top n footer. Opens "Recent Threads"
It's almost frighteningly popular!
 
I've seen this some time ago in the get satisfaction software https://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfaction

I love the idea and i thought people would love & use it, so i created a xf addon, but my stats showed that the users never get familiar with this ( IN THE BREADCRUMB), so i removed it again.
People prefered to have this feature in navbar and the quick navigation (even if the quick navigation is a massive failure, depending on the community 0-24% of the registered users used it at least once:D )
 
The Blizzard one actually opens a list of child forums under each element of the breadcrumb, and this is probably more intuitive behaviour.
The Digital Point menu is, of course complete and comprehensive, and appropriate for their technical audience. I think it would be a bit much for our audience who can be less technical and less able to cope with mega big menus.
 
@James - need to Like it then. ;)

I too think this is good.
Just as a touch of spice I already added a LATEST! button on the end of breadcrumbs top n footer. Opens "Recent Threads"
It's almost frighteningly popular!
Ah, I thought this was add-on discussion. Didn't realise it was a suggestion.
 
I think it could be a reasonable suggestion, but I'm very interested in getting as many opinions as possible as to whether or not it's a good idea. With comments on the best way to implement it.
Whatever happens, we're coding a menu system for AVForums as it's a quick way to both discover and get to the various forums, but it's also what people are used to having.
I'm just interested really in whether people think utilising the breadcrumb is a good way of doing it.
 
I can't think of any drawbacks of such a system.

The breadcrumb link itself would still function as a link so that wouldn't be lost.
All it does is provide another method for quickly navigating around the forum.
 
I can't think of any drawbacks of such a system.

The breadcrumb link itself would still function as a link so that wouldn't be lost.
All it does is provide another method for quickly navigating around the forum.
Question come to me is will this be something that can be maintained in a responsive layout though (while supporting all mobile devices)...

I know you can do lots of "magic" with css3, but at some point or another the the screen size does become a factor.
 
The notion of responsive is just that. As you get smaller, you offer less (well, in terms of information for the most part) to those users.
 
The notion of responsive is just that. As you get smaller, you offer less (well, in terms of information for the most part) to those users.
Some times yeah. Other times a really good responsive is being able to show the same or similar but more optimized. Example: some of the menus here are a great example of that.
image.webp
image.webp
 
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